No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In this long-awaited autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life from his birth in1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
Here is Garcia Marquez s shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be...

In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar head of the Medellin drug cartel kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, Garcia Marquez describes the survivors perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. He also depicts the keening ache of Colombia after nearly forty years of rebel uprisings, right-wing death squads, currency collapse and narco-democracy. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language and journalistic rigor, Garcia Marquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country...

A chilling political thriller set at the end of Peru's grim war between Shining Path terrorists and a morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency.

Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a by-the-book prosecutor wading through life. Two of his greatest pleasures are writing mundane reports and speaking to his long-dead mother. Everything changes, however, when he is asked to investigate a bizarre and brutal murder: the body was found burnt beyond recognition and a cross branded into its forehead. Adhering to standard operating procedures, Chacaltana begins a...

Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented."

For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we...

This volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works: "First Dream," her longest poem and the one that showcases her prodigious intellect and range, and "Response of the Poet to the Very...

Sor Juana (1651-1695) was a fiery feminist and a woman ahead of her time. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she was very much a public intellectual. Her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico," names that continue to resonate. An illegitimate child, self-taught intellectual, and court favorite, she rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age.

This volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works: "First Dream," her longest poem and the one that showcases her prodigious intellect and range, and "Response of the Poet to the Very...

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, now available in a deluxe paperback edition.

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote as presented by the formidable translator Edith Grossman.

This deluxe edition...

Alvaro Mutis is celebrated internationally as the author of the seven novellas, written between 1986 and 1993, that constitute the legendary and widely loved Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, is a wanderer on the face of the earth, always in pursuit of love and fortune, even as he knows that neither can nor...